pany. Many interesting incidents attended the acquirement of the remaining lands. Some suspected the real purpose of the purchaser and hesitated to name a price for their lands to-day, thinking they might obtain a higher one to-morrow; some, consenting one day, repented the next; but quickly, quietly and steadily the astute agent went forward with his plan, until he had bought eleven hundred acres of wretchedly poor farming lands for about $119,000, all he desired except one valuable tract owned by Samuel Ely, whose ancient residence stood upon the site of the present Church of the Rosary. Mr. Ely hated "cotton lords," and even snapped his gun at some strange gentlemen approaching his house to negotiate a purchase. Thinking to intimidate the landholder, they caused his arrest, but found him still obdurate and abandoned further effort. About twenty years afterwards the tract, all except the homestead, was purchased by Bowers and Mosher, and subsequently sold off in building lots. Mr. Ely died in his old home in 1879. The acquirement of titles having been completed in 1847, Thomas H. Perkins, George W. Lyman, Edward Dwight, their associates and successors, were incorporated by the Massachusetts legislature "for the purpose of constructing and maintaining a dam across the Connecticut river and one or more locks and canals in connection therewith," and of creating a water power to be used by said corporation for manufacturing articles from cotton, wood, iron, wool and other materials, to be sold or leased to other persons and corporations, to be used for manufacturing or mechanical purposes, and also for the purposes of navigation. The corporation was to have a capital of four million dollars, with authority to hold real estate not exceeding a half million dollars in value, exclusive of improvements. In the month of July, the driest month of the year, measurements had proved the quantity of water in the river running past a given point to be 6,980 cubic feet per second, descending the rapid at the rate of sixty feet in a mile and a half. As a "mill power" so-called, estimated at sixty or seventy horse-power, was considered to be thirty cubic feet of water per second when the head and fall is twenty-five feet, the volume of water being graduated to a less or greater quantity as the head and fall is greater or less than twenty-five feet, it is seen that under the fifty-nine and nine-tenths feet effective head and fall, from the crest of the proposed dam to still water below, the "mill power" would be a small fraction more than twelve and one-half cubic feet per second, and the river's flowing volume of 6,980 cubic feet per second would signify five hundred and fifty mill powers available during the driest seasons of the year. Therefore, arguing from experience these capitalists believed this vast power capable of building a city of two hundred thousand souls, and planned accordingly. New England's largest river, whose entire flood this dauntless corporation essayed to utilize, has its origin in Connecticut Lake, in the extreme north end of New Hampshire, whence it flows southerly nearly four hundred miles and mingles its fresh waters with Long Island Sound. The river's width along the Vermont border is at first one hundred and fifty feet, and in a flow of sixty miles further gradually increases to three hundred and ninety feet; but in Massachusetts its narrowest sections are about five hundred feet and its widest about one thousand feet. From lake to sound the fall is one thousand five hundred and eighty-nine feet. During the first one hundred miles the aggregate fall is one thousand feet, and the stream pours down a mountain torrent, while the subsequent descent is accomplished chiefly at three points: Bellows Falls, Vermont, where the fall is forty-two feet; Turners Fall, Montague, Massachusetts, where it is seventy-five feet,
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